Girolamo Aleandro was an Italian cardinal, and the first cardinal appointed in pectore.
The Seventeen Provinces were the Imperial states of the Habsburg Netherlands in the 16th century. They roughly covered the Low Countries, i.e., what is now the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and most of the French departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais (Artois). Also within this area were semi-independent fiefdoms, mainly ecclesiastical ones, such as Liège, Cambrai and Stavelot-Malmedy.
Juan Luis Vives March was a Spanish (Valencian) scholar and Renaissance humanist who spent most of his adult life in the Southern Netherlands. His beliefs on the soul, insight into early medical practice, and perspective on emotions, memory and learning earned him the title of the "father" of modern psychology. Vives was the first to shed light on some key ideas that established how psychology is perceived today.
Damião de Góis, born in Alenquer, Portugal, was an important Portuguese humanist philosopher. He was a friend and student of Erasmus. He was appointed secretary to the Portuguese factory in Antwerp in 1523 by King John III of Portugal. He compiled one of the first accounts on Ethiopian Christianity.
Michiel Coxie the Elder, Michiel Coxcie the Elder or Michiel van Coxcie, Latinised name Coxius, was a Flemish painter of altarpieces and portraits, a draughtsman and a designer of stained-glass windows, tapestries and prints. He worked for patrons in the principal cities of Flanders. He became the court painter to successively Emperor Charles V and King Philip II of Spain.
Archduchess Margaret of Austria was Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands from 1507 to 1515 and again from 1519 to 1530. She was the first of many female regents in the Netherlands.
Mercurino Arborio, marchese di Gattinara, was an Italian statesman and jurist best known as the chancellor of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. He was made cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church for San Giovanni a Porta Latina in 1529.
Nicholas Tacitus Zegers was a Flemish Franciscan biblical exegete.
Erasmus Quellinus the Younger or Erasmus Quellinus II (1607–1678) was a Flemish painter, engraver, draughtsman and tapestry designer who worked in various genres including history, portrait, allegorical, battle and animal paintings. He was a pupil of Peter Paul Rubens and one of the closest collaborators of Rubens in the 1630s. Following Rubens' death in 1640 he became one of the most successful painters in Flanders. He was a prolific draughtsman who made designs for decorative programmes in the context of official celebrations, for publications by the local publishers and for tapestries and sculptures realised by the local workshops. His work reveals the Classicist trend in the Baroque.
Dirk Martens was a printer and editor in the County of Flanders. He published over fifty books by Erasmus and the very first edition of Thomas More's Utopia. He was the first to print Greek and Hebrew characters in the Netherlands. In 1856 a statue of Martens was erected on the main square of the town of his birth, Aalst.
Jan Erasmus Quellinus was a Flemish painter and draughtsman and a member of the famous Quellinus family of artists. He was one of the last prominent representatives of the great Flemish school of history and portrait painting in the 17th century. His work displays the classicizing influences of his father Erasmus Quellinus the Younger and Paolo Veronese. Mainly active in his native Antwerp, he worked for some time in Vienna for the Habsburg court as a court painter to Emperor Leopold I.
Jacobus Latomus was a Catholic Flemish theologian, a distinguished member of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Leuven. Latomus was a theological adviser to the Inquisition, and his exchange with William Tyndale is particularly noted. The general focus of his academic work centered on opposing Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, supporting the papacy and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Etymology: Latinized Latomus = Masson from Greek lā-tómos 'stone-cutter, quarryman', thus 'mason'.
Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle (1486–1550) was a Franc-Comtois politician who served as a close trusted adviser to Emperor Charles V. He was made suzerain of the imperial city of Besançon and held an influential position in the Netherlands. From 1530 until his death he was one of the emperor's most trusted advisers in Germany. He was the father of the cardinal and politician Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, also a leading Habsburg minister, and built the Palace Granvelle in Besançon.
In the period 1482–1492, the cities of the County of Flanders revolted twice against Maximilian of Austria, who ruled the county as regent for his son, Philip the Handsome. Both revolts were ultimately unsuccessful.
Conrad Goclenius was a Renaissance humanist, and Latin scholar, and the closest confidant of humanist Desiderius Erasmus, who was born in Mengeringhausen in the Landgraviate of Hesse in 1490, and died in Leuven on 25 January 1539.
The House of Schetz or Schetz de Grobbendonk, originally House von Schetzenberg is a German Noble House. Most famous is the Flemish branch named Schetz, one of whose members became the first duke of Ursel.
Godschalk Ericksen, was Christian II of Denmark's chancellor and later a diplomat at the service of Emperor Charles V.
The Empire of Charles V, also known by the umbrella term Habsburg Empire and labelled "the empire on which the sun never sets", included the Holy Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Burgundian Low Countries, the Austrian lands, and all the territories and dominions ruled in personal union by Charles V from 1519 to 1556. The lands of the empire had in common only the monarch, Charles V, while their boundaries, institutions, and laws remained distinct. Charles's nomenclature as Holy Roman Emperor was Charles V, though earlier in his life he was known by the names of Charles of Ghent, Charles II as Duke of Burgundy, and Charles I as King of Spain and Archduke of Austria. The imperial name prevailed due to the politico-religious primacy held by the Holy Roman Empire among European monarchies since the Middle Ages, which Charles V intended to preserve as part of his project to unite Christendom under his leadership.
The Golden Age of Flanders, or Flemish Golden Age, is a term that has been used to describe the flourishing of cultural and economic activities of the Low Countries around the 16th century. The term Flanders in the 1500s referred to the entire Habsburg Netherlands within the Burgundian Circle of the Holy Roman Empire and inclusive of modern-day Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Its political capital was Brussels, while the financial-economic centre was Antwerp. Other major artistic and cultural centres of the period included Bruges, Ghent, Mechelen and Leuven. It is also grouped with the Dutch Golden Age, a more common term used primarily in reference to the Dutch Republic, and typically dated from 1588 to 1672, within a "Flemish and Dutch golden age" covering the period from the late 15th to the 17th century.
Hendrik Alfons De Vocht (1878–1962), sometimes Henry or Henri, was a pioneer in the academic study of Renaissance Latin texts from the Low Countries.
